Scandinavian Design’ As Discourse: the Exhibition Design in Scandinavia, 1954–57 Jørn Guldberg
’Scandinavian Design’ as Discourse: The Exhibition Design in Scandinavia, 1954–57 Jørn Guldberg In his review in Interiors of the traveling exhibition of Scandinavian Lecture delivered to the London arts and crafts and industrial design, Design in Scandinavia, Edgar College of Communication at the event, Kaufmann, Jr., head of the design department at the Museum “The Limits of Design: Designing for Security and Sustainable Development,” of Modern Art in New York (MOMA), expressed a favorable November 11, 2009 appraisal of the show as a whole.1 Like other commentators, Kaufmann stressed the importance to Americans of this exhibition and anticipated that “… a Scandinavian vogue will again flourish over here.”2 But, unlike most critics and reviewers, he eventually addressed the physical qualities of the objects on display, such as the tables, screens, and show cases that constituted Danish architect and industrial designer Erik Herlöw’s highly flexible installation design. The fixtures were themselves manifestations of the “taste and skill” that the exhibited items featured, Kaufmann stated, and he continued: “Erik Herlöw’s cases, tables, platforms, and lights not only provide an admirable setting; they are the key to what is good in American eyes about Northern design generally. Clean, well-finished, unobtrusive, carefully considered, ingenious, sensible and elegant.”3 The question is, however, whether the attributes Kaufmann cited actually concern things and their objective qualities. Being “carefully considered” and “well-finished” refers to a given object as a product; that is, the qualities are evidence of human invention, planning, and manufacture. The other attributes—clean, unobtrusive, ingenious, sensible, and elegant—may refer to properties of things, but even more, they apply to human beings.
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